Saturday, 19 April 2014

DANTE’S COMEDY

Here are my contributions to a
seminar on Dante’s Divina Commedia conducted with Dr William Johnston on
Thursday the 27th of March 2014 at the Institute for Spiritual
Studies, St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. Will’s papers and other
material from the seminar are available on the parish website.

I. HOW POETS TODAY
REWORK DANTE

Peter
Steele, of blessed memory, Melbourne poet and Jesuit, cites the American Ralph
Waldo Emerson: the Commedia is “autobiography in colossal cipher”. By which he
means, Dante’s life is written large through the code of his poem. Steele
embellishes on that idea by adding that the Commedia “might also be called
metaphor in colossal suspense.” Which I take to mean, Dante’s poem keeps us
hanging on even as it goes on talking about ultimate questions. In literary
terms generally today, this is a central issue because while some writers
strive to find through their words ways of describing and explaining everything
knowable in human terms, others have abandoned that objective, saying words
cannot do this, nor should we be making such grand universalising claims for
our writing. So, while Dante’s critics say the poet can never explain
everything there is to know about existence, Dante nevertheless stands as a classical
example of how this might be achieved. Can our experience be turned into global
statements?

Another
Australian poet, Clive James, once hosted a late night London TV show called
The Late Clive James. This is a very Dantesque joke, where a person who is
alive presents himself as someone who is at the same time over there
interviewing people on the other side. In the introduction to his new
translation of Dante, Clive asks: “What kind of story has all the action in the
first third, and then settles back to stage a discussion of obscure spiritual
matters? But the Divine Comedy (he says) isn’t just a story, it’s a poem: one
of the biggest, most varied and most accomplished poems in all the world.
Appreciated on the level of its verse, the thing never stops getting steadily
more beautiful as it goes on. T.S. Eliot said that the last cantos of Heaven
(Paradiso) were as great as poetry can ever get. The translator’s task is to
compose something to suggest that such a judgement might be right.” (p. xi of
his translation) Interviewed himself lately online, after he almost died, Clive
James said that the thing about Shakespeare and Dante is they both had “an
incredible, vivid capacity for imagery and argument packed into a tight space.”
I would add, they had an incredible store of stories they knew how to retell in
their chosen mode.

Unlike
Clive, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney abandoned the idea of translating Dante and
it is worth hearing why. He says (p. 425-6 of O’Driscoll interview) that “for a
while I was so exhilarated by the whole marvel of Dante that I was tempted to
have a go at doing the complete Inferno – simply for its own imaginative
splendour.” Why did he abandon the idea? “Because I didn’t know Italian,
because I couldn’t gauge tone, because I was at a loss about all the little
particles strewn around the big nouns and verbs. That was what I told myself,
at any rate. I soldiered on for four hundred lines or so, consulting my
Sinclair and my Singleton; but after I’d done three cantos, there was a realization
that I couldn’t achieve what I wanted, which was to get a style going that
would be right for me and the material. I couldn’t establish a measure that
combined plain speaking with fluent movement. I just couldn’t match the shapes
that the bright container of the terza rima contained. For a big job like that,
you need a note that pays you back, if you know what I mean: you need to be
making a music that doesn’t just match the original but verifies something in
yourself as well.” This admission of defeat is honest and salutary. Heaney
recognises that it is better to leave the poem alone rather than deliver
something that doesn’t work effectively. I especially like “all the little
particles strewn around the big nouns and verbs”, which is as good a description
of dealing with Italian as you can get. It is those little inflected vowels
that can change the meaning of a whole verse; sometimes a whole passage can
hang on just one such sound in Italian.

Dante
wrote his poem in the early 1300s. This is only a couple of decades before the
pandemic known today as the Black Death killed possibly over half of Europe’s
population. Dante’s poem is written 200 years before Columbus found the New
World, a major shift in European imagination. Three hundred years before Galileo
proved that the Earth goes around the Sun. Over 500 years before Darwin argued
that our every existence is premised on evolution. Over 600 years before a
human stands on the Moon and takes a photograph of the Earth coming up over the
horizon of its satellite. All of this would have to go into a poem written by
Dante in 2014 because empirical description of the world we know is as much a
part of the Comedy as its spiritual attentions. These questions face serious
writers today, for they are presented with the same basic questions as Dante.
Who are we? What do we make of our temporal existence? Where do we come from?
Where are we going?

Poets
take up Dante’s objectives, or are heavily influenced by his presence. Heaney
abandoned direct translation but then wrote a poem about St Patrick’s Purgatory
in Ireland, one of the original places of the very idea of Purgatory, in which
Dante plays a guiding role. In ‘Field Work’ we hear Heaney’s translation of the
story of Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, the story in one of the lowest
circles of Hell, in which two men’s hatred of one another is so unforgiving
that one perpetually gnaws on the other’s skull. Written in the context of the
bitter conflicts of the time in Northern Ireland, the poem takes on profound
social meaning.

Harking
back, Eliot used Dante as the mood setting and starting point in several of his
most famous poems. “I had not known death had undone so many,” he writes in The
wasteland, written soon after the First World War, the line a direct lift from
Inferno 3, in which Dante describes a near-endless procession of people filing
into Hell:

Si
lunga tratta

Di
gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto

Che
morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.

The
West Australian poet John Kinsella has written his own Divine Comedy, where
Dante’s poem is used as a template for a series of cantos about the private
life of his family on a farm, with repeated expressions of concern about
political collapse, land degradation, climate change, and urban corruption.

And
so on.

But
two kinds of modern writer come close to Dante in their preoccupations: story
tellers who are concerned about the consequences of individual actions, whether
good or bad; and writers in spirituality who wish to explain the connections
between our made-up public lives and our internal private lives, determined as
they are by different experiences of love.

II. AGAINST RECEIVED IDEAS ABOUT THE INFERNO

For
many people, Dante means Inferno. Full stop. Many people who have not read
Dante conclude that it’s ‘That poem about Hell’. Or, and this includes many
genuine readers as well, Inferno is where the action is, and everything later
is not so interesting. Inferno is where all the interesting evil people are to
be found, they believe, and this makes for good literature. Everyone keeps one
eye on the villain, because villains are at the centre of the excitement.
Apparently.

Our
responses in this regard are very modern. It comes from reading too many novels
and seeing too many films. It is our expectation that bad people will help
spice up the story. It defines us as brainwashed romantics with an addiction to
crime stories.

However,
the Comedy is not a novel in the modern sense at all, the novel had not been
invented when Dante wrote his poem. The Comedy draws on romances like Arthur
and other knightly legends and on the courtly love mode then prevalent in
European writing. It is truly an anthology of short stories and anecdotes, but
it is not a novel.

Nor
are the people found in Inferno there for our vicarious delectation as readers
with prurient interests in bad people and what they might do next. They are
there because they are in Hell, and that is the main message. In fact, Dante is
showing us that people in Hell cannot do anything ‘next’. They are actually
trapped permanently and cannot escape. There is No Exit. When we see these
people in such a state Dante and Virgil are asking us, by implication, would
you want to find yourself in this predicament? Because, you see, it is Inferno
that is not interesting. The descriptions are certainly interesting, but who
would want to live there?

A
way to appreciate the message is by paying attention to the character Dante’s
own reactions in the circles he visits with Virgil. When it is sulphuric, he
holds his nose it’s so disgusting. When he sees something especially horrible
in a pit or stream he is shocked, he averts his gaze. Sometimes he gets the
shakes, or faints. In real time, if we were Dante himself and not the armchair
traveller, we are being advised that this would be our response too. Our main
reaction would be: I’m out of here!

Nel
mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi
ritrovai per una selva oscura,

che
la diritta via era smarrita.

(Inferno
I, 1-3)

Companionship
is vital to our reading of the Divine Comedy. Without Virgil we could not
traverse Inferno. I say ‘we’ because the opening lines of the poem must not be
translated ‘In the middle of my life’ but quite explicitly ‘In the middle of
our life’. Brilliantly and subtly, Dante involves us, any reader of his poem,
from line 1 as a fellow traveller. So right away we too trust Virgil and treat
his every word and action with respect and expectation. In fact we too can only
survive Inferno by going along with Virgil. In Inferno we are locked into
witnessing shocking things with only one person to help us through, and even
then Virgil is not always very communicative.

Inferno
is a place of stone, streams, and darkness. It is rough and disorganised. There
is no fiery lava because Dante had never seen a volcano. In fact the further
down we go the colder it gets, until the pit of hell is solid ice. There are
manmade landscapes in Inferno, notably in Malebolge, and we wonder what
constructions Dante knew from life that correlate to these fearsome ditches. We
remember this when we arrive at Purgatorio, because that is a place of
increasing interestingness, where entrances lead to new places full of
something surprising, something to look forward to. At each step of the way in
Purgatorio landscape is increasingly inviting, there is improvement, there is
promise. This is not the case in Inferno.

The
condition of those in Inferno is a warning to the reader about the pitfalls of
committing those things, with the certain implication that we are in fact
capable of doing such things. Inferno is at least realistic in forwarding the
view that humans are quite capable of mistakes, crimes, and evil, and that we
have to start by examining our own selves.

Falling
and rising, descent and ascent are contrasts made between Inferno and Purgatorio.
In Inferno we not only descend physically into more extreme conditions, but the
descent is one of increasingly intolerable scenes of sin and punishment. Dante
himself literally falls down on a number of occasions.

Many
of our modern responses to Inferno are romantic goth. They indulge in the
gloomy and terrifying. Or they presuppose that this is one really weird place
that has to go on the tourist itinerary. Or it’s a chamber of horrors that give
us an added thrill. But all of these modern responses still have to confront
the actual meaning of the words on the gates of Inferno. We will read three
English translations of the words very soon, but here they are in Dante’s
original:

Per me si va ne la città dolente.

Per
me si va ne l’etterno dolore.

Per
me si va tra la perduta gente.

Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;

fecemi
la divina podestate,

la
somma sapienza e’l primo amore.

Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create

se
non etterne, e io etterno duro.

Lasciate
ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.

(Inferno
3, 1-9)

III. MOUNTAIN OF PURGATORY, MOUNTAIN OF HOPE

Although Purgatory was hardly
doubted throughout the Middle Ages, the definition of Purgatory by the Western
Church was only made in 1274, at the Council of Lyons. Dante (1265-1321) in
that year was nine years old, living in Florence, which means he was of the
first generation of Christians to grow up treating Purgatory as an officially
sanctioned place of temporal punishment. In his lifetime Purgatory had moved
from being a need for purification of sin of the departed, to being a
recognised corridor towards paradise, one that all human souls might have to
traverse. Purgatory has suddenly become big time, something we all need to know
about.

So when we read Purgatorio we
are shown a version of the place (it is now a place) at a precise moment in its
evolution in religious awareness. We have to accept the idea that Dante wrote a
poem about somewhere none of us can talk of with 100% certainty, the afterlife,
using geographic forms like a mountain for Purgatory, which all of his readers
knew to be a literary trick, but about which the place itself his readers
decidedly believed in. It is, for us, a remarkable suspension of belief on
their part to read descriptions of Purgatorio knowing they are a fiction, while
the whole time hanging on every word in the certain knowledge that they and
those they love will very likely find themselves in Purgatory itself at some
future date. Anytime soon, in fact. “Metaphor in colossal suspense.” (Peter
Steele)

Purgatorio the poem is an
instruction about expectations. Dante meets two of the vital requirements of
good storytelling: to entertain and to inform. But it is also a warning and
even catechetical in its motives. Attentive readers of Purgatorio are wised up:
they finish the poem better prepared than when they started. And they will read
Dante ahead of other accounts because it is a superlative poetic
accomplishment. While there are countless artworks and writings from the period
that help explain Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise to believers, the Commedia
is an artistic expression in its own league. It is like comparing the rock
video on the subject with the three hour cinematic masterpiece put out by Dante
Studios. There is time for both, but most people will more certainly be wowed
and warned by the big new sensaround release at the local picture house. Soon
to be out on DVD.

Certain outcomes of making
Purgatory doctrine laid the foundations for the Reformation 200 or so years
later, especially in the practice of indulgences. Indulgences do not concern us
here, though it is worth quoting Diarmaid MacCulloch when he delineates the
pre-Reformation obsession with Purgatory geographically, saying that people
north of the alps and on the Atlantic seaboard became more concerned with
prayer as a ticket out of Purgatory than those south of the alps. As he phrases
it in a sentence typical of his suave irony, “Dante Alighieri’s detailed
descriptions of Purgatory in his fourteenth-century masterwork the Divina
Commedia might suggest that southerners were indeed concerned with Purgatory,
but his Italian readers do not seem to have transformed their delight in his
great poem into practical action or hard cash.”

Readers
who get stuck in Inferno and see this as the place where all the action
happens, have a long way to go. Inferno is a dead-end ultimately without an
understanding of what happens next. Indeed, Purgatorio is the poem that helps
us better appreciate what is going on in Inferno.

Quando
la nova gente alzò la fronte

ver’
noi, dicendo a noi: “Se voi sapete,

mostratene
la via di gire al monte.”

E
Virgilio rispuose: “voi credete

forse
che siamo esperti d’esto loco;

ma
noi siam peregrin come voi siete.

Dinzi
venimmo, innanzi a voi un poco,

per
altra via, fu sì aspra e forte,

che
lo salire omai ne parrà gioco.”

And
the new people lifted their faces

toward
us, saying to us, “If you know

the
way up the mountain, show it to us.”

And
Virgil answered, “Possibly you believe

that
this is a place with which we are familiar,

but
we are pilgrims even as you are.

We
came here just now, a little before you did,

by
another way that was so rough and hard

that
the climb must seem like play now, after it.”

(Purgatorio
II, 58-66)

Notice
that the people we meet here are ‘nova gente’ (new people) by contrast with
those in Inferno, who are described as ‘perduta gente’ (Lost people). In these
verses the word ‘peregrin’ (pilgrim) first appears in the Comedy.For the first time in the poem we are on
pilgrimage, we are on the way to learning about ourselves. Inferno was not a
pilgrimage. Inferno was an endurance test, a wakeup call, a place of no escape.
But an early sign that the infernal state has been escaped is the use of
‘peregrin’. It is behind us. While on pilgrimage we are not in a burning hurry,
we can stop when we like, we make conversation as we wish, we have time to
reflect on ourselves and others, what we have been and who we are now and what
we can be in the future. None of that is possible in Inferno, which is
somewhere passed through in haste, quick, get out of there. Inferno is not even
really much of a journey, it is not a tourist destination. Pilgrimage is a
medieval business, a way of finding the Way. Pilgrimage is what we do on earth
in our allotted time, which may be why Purgatorio is for many readers, myself
included, the most accessible and recognisable of the three places in Dante’s
poem. Pilgrimage is a way of reconciling things in our own life: it is a
‘little life’ within the larger span of our life. We may

choose
to remember the poem is set in 1300 that, coincidentally or not, was the first
Holy Year of the Western Church. It was a Jubilee that was, in this case, a
chance for sins to be pardoned if the penitent took a pilgrimage to Rome.

Noi
volgendo ivi le nostre persone,

“Beati
pauperes spiritu!” voci

cantaron
sì, che nol diria sermone,

Ahi
quanto son diverse quelle foci

da
l’infernali! ché quivi per canti

s’entra,
e là giù per lamenti feroci.

Già
montavam su per lì scaglion santi,

ed
esser mi parea troppo più lieve

che
per lo pian non mi parea davanti.

As
we were turning there, voices were

singing,
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,”

so
that there are no words to tell of it.

Oh
how different are these openings

from
those in Hell. Here one enters to singing

and
there below to fierce lamentations.

Now
we were climbing up the sacred stairs

and
seemed much lighter than I had been where

I
was walking on level ground before.

(Purgatorio
XII, 109-117)

Normally
it is harder to walk uphill than on a flat path, but here Dante observes that
he is now lighter than he was previously. This is because heaviness is a
condition of Inferno. Lightness is a feature of Purgatorio. This contrast only
becomes apparent once we read Purgatorio. With each encounter, Dante feels himself
lightened of a burden. Sometimes he talks about a weight being lifted from his
shoulders. The first third of Purgatorio is a physical, emotional and
intellectual effort of overcoming the weighted experience of Inferno. Recent
scarred memory stays in the present. We are made to sense its presence, even
though Inferno, it has been established, is behind us. Gradually, Dante
describes the sense of being freed from the infernal state of mind. Purgatorio
appears to be the place where both gravity and grace are at work, unlike
Inferno where only gravity operates, and Paradiso, where we are drawn into
another place altogether, one only possible through the operations of grace.

We
also find here that people in Purgatorio sing, an expression not to be heard in
Inferno. In Inferno there is weeping, howling, groaning, lamenting. The
contrast is powerful. Singing is a natural human activity indicative of a
listener, of belief in the future, of hope. Human noises in Inferno are the
opposite, negative and painful sounds of enduring suffering and irreversible
loss. Almost every canto of Purgatorio mentions singing. It is the singing of
psalm lines, in particular, for the psalms were the commonly held poetry of the
Mediterranean world of Dante. They were known to educated and uneducated alike.
And we hear in this canto one of the beatitudes: Blessed are the poor in
spirit. Because pilgrims in Purgatorio will hear the words of blessing.

All
of which affirms the central fact that here there is hope. In Inferno we
abandon hope. Complete absence of hope is a definition of Hell. Those in
Inferno are fixed at the stage where they come to a realisation of the sins
they have committed. Such a moment of painful realisation in real life can be
like hell, which is one way of appreciating why Dante places them there: as a
warning. We have to consider the idea that people in Inferno have no wish to be
free of their sin and that hope itself is not on their list of priorities, or
even possibilities. While Purgatorio offers the possibility of moving out of
that fixity, of finding a solution to the mistakes in life, of learning to
overcome past errors.

Penance,
for this reason, is central to an understanding of the first two books of the
Divine Comedy. Repentance and the possibility of being forgiven seem not to be
available to those in Inferno. Almost the entire reason for Purgatorio is
repentance and forgiveness and reparation. The condition of those in Inferno is
a warning to the reader about the pitfalls of committing those things, with the
certain implication that we are in fact capable of doing such things. Inferno
is at least realistic in forwarding the view that humans are quite capable of
mistakes, crimes, and evil, and that we have to start by examining our own
selves. Purgatorio is the option where that examination of self is on offer.
Each individual in Purgatorio is going through some kind of penitential test,
with the aim of future personal restoration.

Similarly,
falling and rising, descent and ascent are contrasts made between Inferno and
Purgatorio. In Inferno we not only descend physically into more extreme
conditions, but the descent is one of increasingly intolerable scenes of sin
and punishment. Dante himself literally falls down on a number of occasions.
Whereas Purgatorio is on the up and up. Here the climb is increasingly easy
(not always what we feel when we actually climb a mountain, by the way) and
Dante is not prone to the same collapses as reported from the previous place.
The further away from Inferno we find ourselves, the lighter we feel.

Falling
asleep is one way of dealing with trauma, with shocking sights not previously
thought imaginable. Sleep is one way of dealing with pain and in Purgatorio
Dante reports on several occasions how he goes to sleep. In Inferno there is
much fainting and swooning, where Virgil is there to pick Dante up and keep him
on track. Perhaps after Inferno Dante was suffering from sleep deprivation and
Purgatorio is a kind of catch-up. No one is going to be caught napping in
Inferno and when Dante does sleep in Inferno it is sudden and deep, as when he
loses consciousness after witnessing Paolo and Francesca in Canto 5. This year
a professor in Bologna offered the theory that Dante himself had narcolepsy.
Retrospective diagnosis based on a literary text is fraught with risk.
Certainly Dante is fascinated with the process of falling asleep and describes
it more than once in beautiful detail. Some critics of the narcolepsy theory
say that Dante describes the poetic state of reverie attendant upon the
creative act. Others that Dante the person in the poem falls asleep at those
moments of the day, evening in fact, when the body would fall asleep naturally,
and that this is Dante’s way of indicating time passing, in places where clock
time is redundant. Whether or not the poet was narcoleptic, the theory draws
attention to the sleep patterns through the poem and the poet’s acknowledgement
of dream states as part of human experience, a source of the poetic muse.

A
noticeable contrast when we enter Purgatorio is improved inter-personal
communication and human contact between Dante and those he meets. Contact is
suddenly real, not just a matter of observation, a quick hello (if that) and
then moving on, as we know it in Inferno. Words are no longer delivered under
duress. Instead of briefings from Virgil about the circle we now find ourselves
in, change happens. People are allowed to share their experiences. They no
longer stand as examples of what we don’t want happening to us, but as people who
by their actions show us what we can do in our own lives. This is why
Purgatorio is the critical book in the Divine Comedy, it is the main access to
the meaning of everything else we read about here. It is the book of examples,
it is ‘Life, a User’s Manual’.

IV. WHY READERS SHUN THE PARADISO

Asked
why readers shun the Paradiso reasons like these crop up:

1.Nothing
happens, there is no action.

2.It’s
unreal. It’s about a place that doesn’t exist.

3.Nobody
is perfect, so why try being perfect?

4.The
poetry is completely over the top.

5.It’s
this Italian poet’s fantasy about a girl he saw once when he was nine or
something.

6.It
depicts an outdated view of existence and the universe.

7.It
is completely removed from my personal experience.

However,
when we read Paradiso we find the complete opposite of these prejudgements and
dismissals. Our expectations are contradicted at every turn.

1.Far
from nothing happening, we find there is too much happening, and we don’t have
a guide like Virgil to explain.

2.Far
from being unreal, Paradiso turns out to be a series of descriptions of the
inner world of our conscious experience.

3.Although
no one is perfect, and Dante admits as much right to the final canto, the poem
describes the increasing wholeness of the person. This means spiritual growth
and maturity, the overcoming and letting go of old ways, as seen in Inferno and
Purgatorio. Each canto introduces a new way of understanding self, and self’s
relationship to others and to ultimate reality.

4.As
for the poetry, Eliot said that the final cantos of Paradiso are as great as
poetry could ever hope to get. Translators, Clive James amongst them, confess
they feel they have to start at the start and work their way through the poem,
rather than picking different sections and piecing it together. It’s as though
they are confronted by the journey presented by Dante, they must go through the
process themselves, from bad to good, damnation to grace. Paradiso is a reward
for the translator. It is a reward for the reader.

5.John
Banville said of Seamus Heaney last year that “Genius is the ability to summon
childhood at will.” It is remarkable that Dante, despite all the relationships,
the ups and downs, in his life writes at all times with the powerful memory of
the beloved young woman he rarely met or was ever close to. In exile in
Ravenna, it is the deep inner connection he has with the world of his
upbringing. I remember this when I ponder the popularity of the three cantiche.
Inferno, it seems to me, is a 20-year-old’s poem, full of danger, inexplicable
action, and bad stuff happening. Purgatorio is a 40-year-old’s poem, looking
backward with some understanding of the good and the bad, knowing there is more
only what and why. While Paradiso is a poem for 60-year-olds, a poem that
reaches for peace and resolution and knows you cannot go on faffing around
forever. You need bearing. The whole Commedia is about the life cycle, the
experience of living itself. And how does Dante maintain perspective? By
focussing on someone he loved before any of the experiences in the poem had
even happened to him, in early adolescence. There she is at the start and at
the end, in the world, as we know it.

6.Paradiso
is unlike any other poem. I am starting to see how one of its main effects is
to describe what it feels like to know you are loved by someone else. This
effect grows larger with each canto. They are descriptions of conscious states
of beatitude, each one more satisfactory than the last. How Dante does this I
just don't know, but the reader experiences the sense of being loved by someone
outside of oneself. All the poetic constructs become quite secondary to this
main experience. It is, for this reason, not Inferno and not Purgatorio.
And even though there is a journey involved, it’s not the going that is important
here so much as the sense of being loved, and blessed. The someone else is
Beatrice, that is Grace in and through a loved person, but is really what we
mean by God.